The ROI question keeps popping up in all our interactions with prospects looking forward to join the social media bandwagon.

The lure of being there is so real and so is the angst with not answering the ROI question.  I read an interesting blog posted earlier this year by Don Martholomew, who calls himself, the Metrics Man.

While I will not repeat what the Metrics Man says in his blog, which I think you will agree is a great read, it’s interesting to note the implications of a value based evolution of social media investments.

One could look at social media presence as an investment for obtaining realistic trending information, which earlier was available only through expensive surveys that were highly perishable in the context of time.   Yes, the tools and science of trending is not really there yet, as both the quantum of data being generated and the complexity of segregating context is a little fuzzy at this point.  But the data captured is real and holds phenomenal future value when systems evolve and accept such data as an input for generating highly contextual trending results for decision making.

When that happens, we may be disappointed that we have not garnered enough data having been worried about ROI as a financial return.